This wasn’t a bounty. It had to be a bribe, to keep him quiet. Even if it hadn’t been coming from Myra, Trinity wouldn’t accept a bounty. He wouldn’t accept a bribe, either.
“I still don’t like it.”
“Then stay here. It doesn’t make any difference to me.”
But he didn’t hang back. They climbed the steps one after the other. Victoria dashed back into the hall and to the kitchen. Not wanting to take a chance the hinges would squeak and alert the boys upstairs, she climbed through the open window and dropped to the ground outside. She had only a few seconds before they searched all the bedrooms and realized she wasn’t there.
Could she make it to the barn without being seen? Not if one of them happened to look out the window. There was no cover, no gully or ravine she could drop into, only the flat hard ground flooded with bright moonlight.
Victoria headed toward the barn at a dead run. She was glad she was barefoot, but the night breeze cutting through her nightgown reminded her that she was practically naked. She made it halfway across the yard much faster than she’d ever thought possible. If she could just make it to the barn before anybody saw her. She was so close … only a few more seconds.
“Hey, Kirby, there’s some gal heading toward the barn at a gallop,” one of the boys yelled from the upstairs window.
If she ever saw that boy again, she’d give him a set of scratches that would make Trinity’s pale by comparison.
She dashed inside the barn, but she knew they’d be after her in seconds. She found Ward lying just inside the door to the tack room. He’d put up a fight, but there had been too many of them. She took precious seconds to stoop down and untie his hands, but he was out cold. She was on her own. There was no one to help her. There was no place to hide. What could she do?
Diablo! He was her only chance—if he would only let her ride him. She didn’t have time for a saddle or bridle. She opened the stall door, led him out, and took a firm hold on his mane.
“If you’re ever going to forgive and forget, please do it now,” Victoria pleaded. “You’re my only hope.”
Using the open stall door, Victoria vaulted on to his back.
She would never have stayed on his back if Diablo hadn’t been more interested in the sound of the approaching footsteps than he was in this harmless woman he’d seen for hours each day. She had hardly gotten her balance when she felt Diablo’s muscles gather. He would explode any minute.
“There she is,” Kirby hollered as the boys reached the open barn door. “Don’t let that horse get out.”
Apparently the sight of three men running toward him, shouting at him, changed Diablo’s mind about bucking. With a scream of fury, he bore down on the boys with bared teeth.
They flew out of his way like released springs.
Victoria had ridden all her life, but she had never ridden a crazy wild horse bareback without even a bridle to guide him. She didn’t know what he might do or where he might go.
Diablo had hardly gone twenty yards before she felt him veer to the left. He was going back. He was going to attack the boys again. If he did, she’d never be able to stay on his back. If he did, they might shoot him.
“No!” Victoria screamed as she brought her open palm down on his withers. Diablo spun around so fast Victoria nearly fell off. He half reared. She only stayed on because of her death grip on his mane.
“After her before she gets away,” Kirby yelled as the three scattered for their horses.
Diablo continued to twist and buck, caught between a desire to get rid of the human clinging to his back and the desire to run down the men on foot. Victoria was helpless.
Someone fired over their heads. Victoria never knew who it was, but the sound of gunfire cleared away Diablo’s confusion. Whirling about, he headed for the nearest horse at a gallop.
He intended to attack both horse and rider.
Once more Victoria screamed and brought her open palm down on his withers. With a scream of rage, Diablo shot past the horse and straight toward the corral fence. Victoria had never jumped before. She held on and prayed.
Diablo took the fence with the ease of an antelope, and headed for the far side of the corral.
“Cut them off,” Kirby yelled. “She’s getting away.”
They were closing in on her from two sides, and a second fence separated her and Diablo from freedom, but no one suspected Diablo’s speed. He jumped the second fence as easily as the first and headed toward the open prairie. Even though the other horses had a shorter distance to run, he shot out of the trap like an unleashed thunderbolt. In seconds he doubled the distance between Victoria and her pursuers. A few more seconds, and it had doubled again. In a minute he was beyond the range of their guns.
Victoria’s relief was short-lived. She had gotten away, but what could she do now? Where could she go? There wasn’t anybody who would protect her. Her uncle couldn’t possibly have arrived yet.
What would Trinity do? He gets out of trouble all the time. Think of what he would do.
He had told her to go to the sheriff and ask him to put her in jail. They couldn’t hang her right away, not when she told them Trinity was bringing proof she hadn’t killed Jeb. No matter what Judge Blazer said, they’d have to wait until Trinity got back.
She pulled on Diablo’s mane. They had a long ride ahead, and she wanted to conserve his energy. She was confident Kirby and his friends wouldn’t catch up. Not only had their horses already made the long trip, they weren’t nearly as fast as Diablo. But if Kirby knew she was at the ranch, someone else might also know. She might have to make another run for it, and she didn’t want Diablo to exhaust himself now.
Diablo resisted at first, but he gradually slowed down until he reached a canter. He was blowing a little at first, and that worried Victoria until she realized it was temper. After a little while longer, he relaxed into an easy canter. Keeping him locked up in the corral hadn’t helped his condition, but he was fully rested. They ought to have no trouble reaching Bandera ahead of any pursuers.
Victoria entered through the back of the jail. Even though it was four o’clock in the morning, she hadn’t dared ride down the main street in her nightgown. Sheriff Wylie Sprague came out of his bed with a flying leap when he saw her. His jaw dropped when he realized who she was. Victoria didn’t give him a chance to say a word.
“I’m Victoria Davidge, and I’ve come back to prove I didn’t kill Jeb Blazer. I’ve got a man coming with the proof in a couple of days. I’ve also got a lawyer coming to handle the retrial and a detective to find out who did kill Jeb.”
“What the hell are you doing here in your nightgown?” Sprague demanded, too staggered at the sight of a nearly naked woman in his jail. “If the Judge finds out you’re here, hell order a hanging before sundown.”
“Then I suggest you don’t tell him I’m here. My uncle has a stay of execution from the governor. If I’m not alive when he gets here, the Judge will hang for murder. And you’ll hang right beside him.”
Victoria hoped she had lied convincingly. That threat might be the only thing that would keep Judge Blazer from hanging her.
The sheriff swallowed. She could tell the whole situation had taken him by surprise. He wasn’t ready to deal with such a complicated and delicate problem, but he knew something didn’t smell quite right.
“Don’t tell me you came here to sit quietly and wait for all these people to get here. You’ve been hiding somewhere. Why aren’t you still there?”
I was supposed to stay at the Demon D until everybody got here, but somehow Myra Blazer found out where I was. She sent Kirby and two other men to kidnap me.”
“What did they want with you?”
“I don’t know.”
“But Myra and Kirby never believed you did it. They said so.”
“I know that, but Trinity said I wasn’t to go anywhere with anyone. They were going to take me away. I heard Kirby say so. They’re probably behind me right now.”
/> “What do you want me to do?”
“Keep me here in the jail until Trinity and my uncle get back.”
“But if Blazer orders me to hang you—”
“The Judge can’t hang me. Just you.”
“But if Trinity doesn’t have proof.”
“He has it already. It’s just going to take him a day or two to get here. If you don’t believe me, go out to the Demon D and ask Ward Baldwin.”
That name seemed to clinch it for the sheriff.
“You’re lucky. The Judge is away in Austin. I’ll keep you here until he gets back, but they’d all better be here by then. Otherwise I’m washing my hands of the whole business.”
“You can’t” Victoria said, so relieved she could hardly keep up the pressure on the sheriff. “From now on, you’re responsible for everything that happens to me.”
“Well the first thing I’m going to do is get you some clothes. If the ladies of this town ever find out I had a woman in my jail dressed like you, I’d be out of a job in ten minutes.”
A few minutes later, dressed in a shirt and a pair of pants much too large for her, Victoria stretched out on the cot on the same cell where she had stayed five years earlier and watched the scaffold go up outside her window. She never thought she’d be glad to be inside a jail again, but she felt safe. Either Ward or Trinity would find out where she was, she needn’t worry about sending a note. With Diablo guarding the rear of the jail, Ward would soon know where she was.
“You fool!” Myra glared at her son out of red, catlike eyes. “Three of you, and you can’t even capture one girl. I can’t trust you to do even the simplest thing.”
Even in her son’s eyes, Myra Winslow Blazer was a great beauty. Her features were classically perfect, but Myra’s strong personality kept her beauty from being merely insipid. Though into her late thirties, her hair was the color of ebony silk. It grew in such profusion and to such a length it took her maid nearly thirty minutes each day to dress it atop her head. She had flawless skin, a generous mouth, and eyes which seemed to turn every color in the rainbow depending on her mood.
There was a timelessness about Myra’s beauty and a forcefulness about her personality which never failed to subdue even the strongest male resistance. Over the years she had become accustomed to getting what she wanted, exactly what she wanted.
A woman of considerable property in her own right, she had achieved great wealth when she married Judge Blazer seven years earlier.
She kept a San Antonio seamstress and two assistants busy around the clock making gowns fashioned after the latest Paris designs. She wore enough jewels at her throat, in her hair, on her arms, and across her bosom to ransom a king. The house the Judge had built for her was spectacular even by Texas standards, but her bedroom was wormy of a Vanderbilt. A Louis the Sixteenth bed with a silk canopy dominated the enormous room. Gilt and velvet-upholstered furniture, red silk hangings, and an Aubusson carpet completed a room completely at variance with the rough and ready spirit of Texas.
“I keep telling you, I never saw a horse run like that,” Kirby replied. “We might as well have been riding jackasses.”
“At least you would have been appropriately mounted,” she snapped. Even in anger, Myra looked like a goddess. “Why did you let her reach the horse? Can she run faster than you?”
“I couldn’t just bust into that house. He could have been inside. He’d have been within his rights to shoot me. She must have seen us coming and run out the back just as we went in the front. We thought we had her, but that horse jumped the fence like it had wings.”
“Enough of this miraculous horse. You have bungled a perfectly simple job. Now I shall have to think of something else.”
“Why is it so important for you to see Victoria?” Kirby asked. “You never liked her much.”
“Because, you idiot, if Victoria has come back, it’s only to prove she didn’t kill Jeb.”
“But you never thought she did.”
“I know that, but as long as the Judge was convinced she did it, it didn’t matter what I said. Now it will.”
“I don’t understand. If she can prove she didn’t do it, you ought to be happy.”
“If she didn’t kill Jeb, you innocent fool, that means somebody else did.”
“So?”
“So you and I have the most to gain by Jeb’s death. We have the best motives. Even if they can’t find any evidence, the Judge can’t help but wonder. He might even decide to divorce me. I can’t allow that.”
“But we have alibis.”
“We could have hired someone else.”
“But we didn’t kill Jeb.”
“Apparently neither did Victoria, but they convicted her anyway”
“You mean they could convict us without evidence?”
That’s exactly what I mean.”
“But what good would it do to bring Victoria here?”
“If she never tells her story, everything will stay just the way it is now”
“But why would she agree to keep quiet?”
“I don’t imagine she will. Otherwise, why would she have left Arizona?”
“Then what are you going to do?”
“We’ve got to fix it so this can never happen again.”
“But you can’t mean to—”
“That’s exactly what I mean to do.”
It was a seedy hotel in a seedy town, but then Trinity expected that. It was nearly noon, not yet time for an afternoon siesta, but nothing moved. Not even in the American part of town.
The heat was stifling. It hovered over the town like a giant dome, drawing in the sunlight, shutting out the breeze from the river, turning the few raindrops, which dared fall, into steam. A horse stood at a hitching rail, too listless to fight off the flies that buzzed around its head. A skinny dog dozed in the strip of shade provided by a rickety bench.
Trinity had seen many such towns, towns that were dying because the reason for their birth no longer existed. The few unpainted buildings sagged a little more each year. Its population grew older and slower because the young moved on to more promising places. Trinity hated towns like this, but he didn’t expect to stay long. He had come to find Chalk Gillet.
There was nobody at the hotel desk when he entered. The place exuded an atmosphere of death. An exceedingly plain woman with wispy grey hair and a faded dress came in answer to his kick on the desk with his dusty boot.
“Don’t do that,” she complained. “It leaves scars.”
“I’m looking for Chalk Gillet,” Trinity told her. “They said you’d know where to find him.”
“Maybe I do. What’s in it for me?”
Greed and cunning shone brightly in her eyes.
“A dollar.”
She spat out a particularly foul curse. “I wouldn’t talk to the Devil for no more’n a dollar.”
“How about ten dollars?”
“You want him bad?”
“Enough to pay to find him.” She held out a bony hand for the money. “But not enough to pay more than five now and five later.”
She eyed him hatefully. “How’s I to know you’ll come back?”
“What proof do I have you know where he is?”
“Everybody knows. He’s been living here for years.”
“In that case I’ll ask someone a little less expensive.”
The woman dashed from behind the desk to stop him leaving the hotel. “Give me the five, and I’ll tell you.” Trinity handed her a coin which she inspected carefully. “You promise to give me the rest before you leave town?”
“If you’ll tell me if he has an escape route.”
The old woman eyed him suspiciously and then started to snicker.
“You’re a crafty one, you are. He lives in a house just outside of town. A cabin really, but he insists it’s a house. It backs up to a dry creek all covered in willows and mesquite thickets. If he sees somebody he don’t trust coming up the front, he drops down in that creek and is
up in those hills in a minute. Keeps a horse back there.”
Trinity looked at the coin in his hand, then handed it to the woman.
“Anything else I ought to know?”
“He’s got the place stashed with guns. If he’s dressed, he’s got one up his sleeve. A knife in his boot, too.”
“How do you know all this?”
“He likes female company. Dora’s up there right now.”
Trinity stepped a little closer and said in a soft, deliberate voice, “If you’ve told me a single lie, I’ll come back for my money. Then I’ll burn down this rubbish heap with you in it.”
Looking a little less sure of herself, the old woman watched Trinity leave. “Come evening, Dora’s going to be looking for another job,” she muttered to herself.
Trinity relaxed in the shade of a cottonwood and willow grove. Close by a short, powerful paint pony munched oats from an open sack next to a tub one-third full of tepid water. Chalk hadn’t skimped on his security precautions.
Neither had Trinity. He had loosened the cinch on the saddle. It just sat on the pony’s back. And he had hobbled him. If Chalk was to get away, he would have to do it on foot. He looked at his watch. Ben ought to be approaching the front door in a couple of minutes. The hunt would soon come to an end.
It had taken more time than Trinity expected. When he reached Uvalde, he had found a message from Ben telling him to come to Santa Lucinda. That had taken another day’s ride. He intended to be on his way back tonight, but it would be two days before he could reach the Demon D. He hoped Victoria was all right.
The sound of footsteps along the rocky path up to the house brought Trinity to his feet. Ben was going to pretend to be a sheriff from Texas. He was wearing Trinity’s deputy sheriff badge. Trinity expected Chalk to reach the ravine about thirty seconds after Ben knocked on the front door.
He made it in twenty.
“I cut the cinch,” Trinity said when Chalk and the saddle ended up in a heap on the sandy floor of the ravine. “I hobbled him, too.”
“Who the hell are you?” Chalk demanded.
He was an ugly man, two inches shorter than Trinity, gone to fat, unshaven and unbathed. He eyed Trinity fearfully, but also with a crazy kind of courage, the courage of a man blessed with too much luck, a man who doesn’t believe anything really bad can happen to him.
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